Attorneys and other members of the legal profession are required to take certain actions in accordance with deadlines established by various statutes and court rules. Members of the legal profession place great emphasis on meeting these deadlines as the failure to adhere to such deadlines can have significant consequences for the attorneys' clients. Rather than relying on memory or the use of a personal calendar, many professionals within the legal industry use some form of a docketing system, often a computerized docketing system to track and notify legal professionals of the upcoming deadlines. In addition to tracking deadlines, conventional computerized docketing systems record all activities occurring for a number of cases. The accuracy and use of a computerized docketing system is of paramount importance to practicing litigation attorneys.
There are many commercially available case management systems, many of which provide for the docketing of events, manual recording of future tasks and deadlines, and notification to users regarding upcoming events. One such commercially available system is known as the MA-3000™. system, associated with the New York Law Journal. This system includes both a basic docketing system and a search of a daily industry newspaper.
There also exist service organizations that electronically or manually monitor pending court cases and provide notification, for example, via electronic mail, of activity recorded by the court for certain identified (or “watched”) cases. When information regarding a watched case becomes available, an alert is generated and distributed to interested subscribers. In addition, some existing service organizations attempt to locate any court documents, for example, a court decision or order, and deliver a copy of the document to the subscribers, along with the alert. As an alert may be generated in advance of the availability of the court document, there may be a period of time between the delivery of the alert and the delivery of the actual document associated with such alert. It is common for both alerts and associated court documents to be delivered to subscribers in electronic form via an electronic mail message. It is also common for these existing systems to provide additional information related to the operation of court systems, such as a calendar for one or more judicial officials or information on court rules and procedures. The electronic mail alerts from the service organization may interface with the above-described case management system or with a software module developed by the service organization and maintained on a user's computer system. In addition, the service organizations may host a web site that may be used by law firms, law departments, and the like to retrieve case information. The website may also provide court rules, forms and other similar information. One such service organization is CourtAlert.com, Inc., CourtAlert®
In a typical large law firm or law department, a managing clerk or paralegal is responsible for managing and tracking the docket reports for a large number of legal cases. It is typical for this clerk to receive information from a variety of sources, such as other professionals assigned to the case, and the service organizations described above, enter the information in a computerized docketing system, track important due dates, and advise various team members regarding the status of the cases and upcoming due dates. This clerk typically uses the above-described computerized legal case management system. For example, the clerk may receive an alert from CourtAlert and manually enter or cut-and-paste the information from the alert into the case management system.
It is difficult using the available docketing systems to readily integrate information together—for example, information recently provided by a service organization with information previously contained in the docketing system. Furthermore, in addition to accurately tracking and reporting important due dates, it is important that the case management system not over report activities, i.e., by ensuring that a single deadline or event is not needlessly reported to case members multiple times. It is, therefore, needed that there is a choice and a way to remove reported events and deadlines, automatically or otherwise, from the schedule of events and deadlines.
Thus, there is a strong need for a system that allows a user to integrate and reconcile court sourced information, such as derived from alerts received from service organizations, with pre-existing docket records within the computerized docketing system. Preferably, such a system would be integrated into a computerized docketing system that permits users to reconcile information, update or create new docket records, customize forms according to user need, create new cases and new docket records to include user specific fields of information, collect and collate together docket records, cases, documents, remove, edit and revise documents, keep a track of revisions, and create or modify, diary entries, track revisions in docket entries, and apprise case team members with respect to the updated information.